Having established completeness of a file, the only way a record can lose its "\n" unexpectedly is by means of a programming error, such as making a conditional substitution that happens implicitly to remove it but only where the pattern matches.

You are apparently unfamiliar with the idea that Unix files can have a missing newline at the end. As a programmer, I must deal with files like that.

Are you suggesting that instead of writing a simple chomp in each program that reads possibly-newline-terminated strings, I explictly put the code in there for that? I hope not. If Perl were that way, I'd be quickly writing "randalchomp" that acts like chomp does now, and figure out a way to include it in every program.

Chomp is there because it perfectly fills a need. That's why we use it.